11-737 Multilingual NLP Lang in 10: Hindi Example of 10 minute - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

11-737 Multilingual NLP Lang in 10: Hindi Example of 10 minute presentation on a language

Hindi हहनदी  Hindi spoken in Northern India ● 320mn native speakers ● 270 L2 speakers ● 3 rd or 4 th most spoken language in world (after Mandarin, English, Spanish)  Lingua franca for Northern India ● Taught in schools throughout India  Hindi != Urdu ● But mutually intelligible ● Writing script is different (but writing style is different too) ● Hindi more Sanskrit words, Urdu more Persian/Arabic words ● Sometimes both are called “Hindustani” ● Share phonology, grammar 11-737 Multilingual NLP

Hindi  Indo-European → ● Indo-Iranian → Indo-Aryan → Western Hindi → Hindustani → Hindi  Has common cognates with European languages महा रजा (maha raja) → magnus royal (great king) ●  Numbers ek do teen chaar paanch  Script is Devnagari देवनागरी  Brahmi script (as many Indian subcontinent languages are)  Also used for nearby languages (e.g. Marathi, Nepali)  Urdu uses Perso-Arabic (Nasta’liq)  Often in social media contexts Hindi is written in latin script 11-737 Multilingual NLP

Grammar  Default order: S O V  But often pro-dropped, subject  Gender for all nouns  Inflection morphology for agreement  Ergative marking ● In transitive verb (sometimes) agreement is object/verb not subj/verb 11-737 Multilingual NLP

Phonology  Vowels: schwa, vowel length (plus borrowed vowel ae from English) From Ohala 1999 via Wikipedia 11-737 Multilingual NLP

Phonology – consonants From wikipedia: Hindi Phonology 11-737 Multilingual NLP

Hindi vs Hinglish  Most educated Hindi speakers are fluent in English  Code-switching: mixing of two languages in one utterance ● Common in multilingual environments ● Typically more common in casual speech (online text) ● Borrows phonology, morphology, grammar from both languages  In last 50 years more and more English borrowing in Hindi ● Hinglish may be the new Hindi. 11-737 Multilingual NLP

Lang in 10  History, geography, social position  Linguistic: morphology, grammar, phonology  Examples of something (linguistically) interesting about the language  Status with respect to resources  Influences, social use, issues that may affect collection/access 11-737 Multilingual NLP

11-737 Multilingual NLP